Is Your API Ready For Wholesale?

09 Jan 2014

As the number of public APIs grows well beyond 10K, expecting that developers will discover, let alone come to your developers area regulary will be reduced to just a fantasy. In this new API driven economy, your API will need to be decoupled, portable, and available in a wholesale manner, allowing other API providers to hang your valuable API resources in their own developers area.

If your API is developed in a simple, standard way, described using a common API definition format like Swagger, API Blueprint or RAML, your account provisioning and management has an API, and terms of service (TOS) are flexible--you will be bundled with leading API platforms, available in the growing number of backend as a service (BaaS) platforms, and easily listed in API hubs like Mashape and APIHub.

In 2014 it won’t be enough to just have an API and a developer area with all the essential building blocks, you need to make sure your API is ready for re-use and re-sale. Sure we all want to be the Twilio of the API universe, but in reality we need developers to use our resources. Of course this approach to API deployment won’t be for every API, some resources just can’t be resold like this, but for many of the API resources I’m seeing in the space, it will be the difference between life or death.